Migrant workers are scheduled to hold a march in Taipei on Sunday to call for the equal treatment of people involved in the provision of long-term care, rally organizers announced yesterday.
The biennial march this year has the theme of “care justice” —the equal treatment of seniors, the disabled, their family members, foreign caregivers and household caretakers without the threat of fear, exploitation or violence.
Scalabrini International Migration Network in Taiwan head Chuang Hui-ling (莊惠玲) said there are about 770,000 people in Taiwan in need of long-term care, of whom 450,000 (58 percent) are cared for by their families and 230,000 (30 percent) are cared for by foreign caregivers.
Photo: Huang Pang-ping, Taipei Times
Another 4 percent are institutionalized and the remaining 8 percent receive household services from the government, he said.
Hsinchu Catholic Diocese Migrants and Immigrants Service Center counselor Liu Hsiao-ying said family members or foreign caregivers spend up to 14 hours per day for an average of 10 years caring for people with long-term care needs.
“This is a tremendous burden for them physically and emotionally, but the issue has not been recognized or heeded by the government or society,” Liu said.
The burden of caring for those needing long-term care falls on families more than 90 percent of the time, with the service provided by the government in less than 10 percent of cases, Chuang said, adding that the groups feel the government needs to do more.
The marchers are expected to start on Ketagalan Boulevard in front of the Presidential Office Building, walk past Taipei Railway Station and move toward their final destination — the campaign headquarters of Democratic Progressive Party presidential candidate Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文), who is favored to win the Jan. 16 presidential election.
All three presidential candidates have made long-term care a priority issue, but they lack substantive proposals on the provision of care, such as whether long-term care institutions should be run by business groups, Chuang said.
Chuang, Liu and other migrant worker representatives also called for the scrapping of the private brokerage system in favor of a direct nation-to-nation hiring system, allowing migrant workers to freely change employers, and ending the ceiling on the number of years migrants can work in Taiwan.
They also want to see the end of a rule requiring migrants to leave Taiwan for at least one day after the expiration of their standard three-year work contract. The groups feel that the rule gives foreign labor firms another way to exploit workers.
The sponsors said that Sunday’s rally would attract about 1,500 people, among them workers from the Philippines, Indonesia, Vietnam and Thailand and representatives of Taiwan’s labor unions and student and civil groups.
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